Gmail Promotions Tab Grid View

Provided by Josue Sierra04.09.14

Background

2

Gmail has released a limit pilot of a more visual grid view of emails landing in their promotions tab.

3

Executive Summary

• Gmail grid view displays offers and other promotional mail in an alternative, more visual way in the Promotions tab. Gmail uses an algorithm that attempts to determine the most relevant image from a message to display. However, if you’re a sender of promotional email, you can use markup to specify the image or content to display to help your readers get the best experience.

• Ensure your email creative are being coded to maximize the visual impact of the new Gmail grid view promotions tab.

• Coding instructions and recommendations are available for AORs or teams doing email coding.

4

Example of Gmail Promotions Tab in Grid View

Stronger visual before the email has been opened gives us the opportunity to use images to influence “opens” beyond just the subject line.

Note: Subject line and friendly “From” are displayed right below the image.

5

• You can reference any image. If you explicitly reference an image to use in the grid within your HTML, rather

than let Gmail picked one, it doesn’t need to be an image used in the email.

• The grid view is on by default. Well at least for the Gmail users accepted into the trial. That doesn’t mean it’s

on by default should Gmail make a full rollout.

• The image is only retrieved once regardless of the number of recipients who receive the email. Adding a

unique identifier to the image should make it load once per recipient.

• The image is only first loaded by Gmail when the grid is shown to the user. So if a user doesn’t go to the

promotions tab or has the grid turned off its never loaded.

• Animation is not possible. If the image is a gif with animation only the first frame is shown.

• Restricting caching: Setting the image attribute to “no-cache” with header “Cache-Control: no-cache, max-

age=0” causes Gmail to fetch the image each time the grid view is rendered (ie. each time the user visits the

tab or returns to the tab upon reading an email)

Once an email has been read the image in the grid is given 50% transparency to drop its prominence

Remember it’s a trial and quite possible Google will tweak the way it works before any full rollout.

Early Testing Insights

6

Email Rendering Examples- Below are examples of emails that did not render the main hero image. - In some, no thumbnail was rendered. In that case, Gmail will display the first initial of the

email “sender” name. - On emails without a hero image, Gmail will display text from within the body copy.

7

• Because this is only in a test phase, not all of your target customers will be using the new visual promotions tab.• We do not know what is the rollout schedule for Gmail, and Gmail may choose to roll this feature out to all their customers in the near future. • Actions should be taken to update email creative HTML code to reflect Gmail’s requirements to maximize this new feature.

Recommendations

Provide your email coding team with the following resources, requesting email creative HTML be updated to account for these changes:

http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2337003/tips-for-designing-email-for-google-s-new-promotions-tab-grid-view

https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions/reference/offer